


what to do with the time that is given to us

by plinys



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag - Aruba, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-15 05:43:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10551038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: It’s 2014 and Len is standing in a warehouse and nothing makes sense.(OR: Len remembers bits and pieces of his time with the Legion of Doom.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [isloremipsumafterall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isloremipsumafterall/gifts).



> Beej prompted me with Coldwave where Len remembered/had dreams about what happened in the finale, so I wrote this thing. It's kinda a mess, so I'm writing her a different fic later, and it's un-beta'd so yeah.

It’s 2014 and Len is standing in a warehouse and  _ nothing makes sense _ .

He doesn’t know why he’s there. Something about a call, an anonymous tip from someone who wanted to help him step up his game against the Flash. But then there’s no one there, just a sense that something isn’t right. 

His eyes burn like someone shined a bright light into them and he can’t seem to blink the spots away. He stands there for a while, trying to blink the lights away, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.

Drugged.

He felt a little drugged. 

But there was no sign of anyone around to have drugged him, nothing missing on his person when he checks his pockets a second later - cold gun still resting against his hips. 

He pushes his sleeves up to check his arms for tracks. He hasn’t used in forever - he doesn’t not anymore, not since he got clean for Lisa’s sake years ago, but drugs would explain all of this. Would explain the blur in his vision and the dragging feeling that weights off his body. 

He smooths his hands down over his parka only to freeze as his fingers snag along the edge of the fabric, where it rubs wrong against his fingers. Taking the parka off to inspect it reveals a large burn along the side that Len can’t remember how he acquired. 

Something was certainly not right. 

He fumbles his phone out of his pocket to check the time, but it’s not long since the last time he remembered, not long enough to explain the way he feels, to explain the exhaustion and the burn mark. 

There’s a missed text on the front of the screen, from Lisa, a series of emojis that he interprets to mean one thing  _ Mick is back in town _ . 

Well, that would explain the burnt parka.

  
  


*

  
  


A week later he gives Mick the heat gun, the partner to his cold gun and everything seems right in the world - this is how things were supposed to be, the two of them against the world. Even if everything else had come between them, even if they hadn’t talked to each other in months  - not since Len left Mick in a hospital burn unit, unable to handle the things he had been feeling.

This seems right.

Like the universe approves of his decision. 

Like a weight has been lifted off of his chest.  

He watches Mick flick his lighter on and off, sprawled across the couch in their current safehouse and this feels right. 

He curls his hand around Mick’s neck and pulls him up for a kiss and this feels right. 

He feels Mick’s heart beat steady underneath him and this feels right. 

  
  


*

  
  


Nightmares.

He remembers the first time he woke up from his nightmares to find Mick beside him. It was back at juvie, they were both smaller back then, small enough to fit together in a twin size bed, Mick’s body a steady comfort against his to keep the nightmares out.

Now. 

Laying there together, sharing that bed, doesn’t make Len feel safe. 

Not when his nightmares are so vivid, vivid enough that they don’t feel like nightmares they feel like memories come back to haunt him, but these aren’t the usual memories - of his father hurting him or Lisa. 

No, these are always the same.

A battlefield, in the middle of a war a battle raging down around them.

Mick holding his heat gun to the neck of a man that Len doesn’t know but for some unexplainable reason feels the need to protect over his partner. Then, he says something, words that he can never remember upon waking. 

The feelings wash over him in a consistent series: abandonment, betrayal, anger.

Then Mick dies. 

He always wake up when Mick dies, gasping, unable to breathe, hands shaking as he reaches towards the body next to him, searching for a pulse, for some sort of sign that Mick is alive and that he hasn’t killed him. 

Len doesn’t get emotionally vulnerable, he pushes it down until he can pretend that he doesn’t feel anymore, but after the fifth dream his voice choked up with fear he can’t help himself. 

“I’m here, Len, I’m alive,” Mick says, because he’s learned to roll with it. To offer Len comfort as he always has, without even knowing why. 

Len can’t even begin to think about explaining the dreams to Mick.

Instead he takes what comfort he can. 

Moving closer to his partner in the dark, voice only a little bit shakey when he says, “Promise me you’ll stay that way?”

  
  


*

  
  


He buys - well,  _ steals  _ \- books on dreams. On past lives. On alternate realities. 

And in between planning his heists he studies. 

He lays out on their safe house couch while Mick works on an engine and studies, tries to see what his dreams are telling him. Thumbs through book after book, looking up every few pages to remind himself why he’s doing it. 

Somewhere around chapter three he looks up to find Mick staring back at him, there’s grease smeared across his cheek and a part of Len wants to sit up to wipe it away, but another part of him holds back.

The part of him that still remembers last night’s repetition of the nightmare all too well.

“You don’t honestly believe that shit, do you?”

Len snaps the book shut, the title staring back up on it  _ A Guide To Using Guided Meditation To Awaken Memories of One’s Past LIfe. _

Len avoids answering the question, instead asks one of his own, “Have you ever had dreams that seem like memories, but aren’t?”

Mick shrugs.

“I don’t have the best memory.” 

Which yes, Len knew that, but that didn’t answer the question.

Mick didn’t usually avoid the question. 

“Have you,” he pushes, so that it becomes unavoidable. 

He isn’t sure what he wants - Mick to confirm dreaming of a past life where Len kills him or -

Or what?

Mick grabs his beer of the table and takes a long drink before slamming it back down, “Right when we first met, back in juvie, you remember how I used to tell you about these dreams I’d have of a house in England and this blonde girl with a horrible bangs and a tight ass-”

“Yes, Mick,” he says sharply, because how could he forget that. 

His first hint of jealously over some girl that a teenage Mick had dreamed up.

He’d gotten over that of course, around the same time that the therapist at juvie kept telling Mick that his pyromania had led to fever dreams when overwhelming by the burning of his childhood home. 

“-Right. They’re still there. Sometimes there’s others there. Sometimes we’re on a fucking spaceship. Sometimes it’s me talking to myself.”

“Well, that’s not exactly surprising for you to talk to yourself, now is it, Mick?”

“This me, talking to kid me,” Mick clarifies. “Doesn’t always feel like a dream, but it sure as hell ain’t a past life.” 

He doesn’t realize how significant what Mick says until years later. 

  
  


*

  
  


The Flash says time traveling speedster from the future, says the man in yellow, and Len doesn’t even have to think before a name comes to mind -  _ Eobard Thawne _ . 

He thinks it five minutes before the Flash says the words, and everything sort of clicks. 

“I think I’ve worked with him before,” he tells Lisa in an undertone. 

His sister gives him a look that says her complete lack of surprise, “Really, Lenny, like I somehow could’ve missed that you’ve worked with the Flash before?” 

“Not him, the other speedstar.” 

Lisa’s eyes widen a fraction, “When would you have worked with a time traveling speedstar?” 

He finds he can’t answer the question. 

_ Time Travel  _ would make a whole lot more sense than a past life. 

But when the fuck had he gone  _ time traveling _ ?

  
  


*

  
  


“Time travel,” Len says, to Mick later. 

After he’s freed those that the Flash and his team had imprisoned, after he’s already started recruiting his band of Rogues.

During the calm before the inevitable storm. 

Mick doesn’t react with nearly as much surprise as he would have expected. He just sits there and shrugs and takes another drink, “Makes sense.” 

“Does it?” 

Because Len has prepared for this conversation, he’s hunted for evidence for proof.

For other things he knows without thinking.

For historical crimes that fit his usual style.

For pictures of men who look similar to himself scattered throughout time.

For Mick -

He finds Mick. 

He finds a statue in Washington DC of a Private Rory, who apparently saved the life of George Washington. 

He finds a painting from France of an noble man with unmistakable features.

He finds an account of a bar fight from World War II, blurry pictures but one figure clear in the middle of the fight. 

He finds a book written by HG Wells, describing a spaceship in the wild west and a man that burns a bar down. 

Mick is scattered throughout time, but Len.

Len can’t find a trace of himself to matter how hard he looks.

All he can find is the dream, the horrible dream, of killing Mick that comes again and again and again. Until he almost wishes for the dreams about his horrible childhood to come up instead. 

“Makes as much sense as anything else.”

  
  


*

 

The nightmares die down after that, whether acceptance or just the passing of time, it’s December of 2015, and he’s moved on. His nightmares have changed, shifted, into something different, something new each time. 

The battlefield still comes from time to time, but it is rare, and when he wakes up there’s not always a Mick beside him to check for a pulse. 

Not here in jail, in solitary, in the metahuman wing. 

He almost can forget all about it, so busy getting his criminal enterprise going, getting his Rogues in order. 

That is until he’s given a book, something to keep himself entertained while he waits for his life sentence to end, (or for someone to come break him out again).

The war journals of the author of the Lord of the Rings books.

_ Lieutenant Tolkien _ .

  
  


*


End file.
